"Let us go into the mountains and be happy." – Serge

To be human is to be born with a kind of emptiness. We might fill that emptiness with a thing, an idea, an action, a goal, a drug…. The glass is not half full, nor half empty, rather it may be utterly void and incapable of being filled.

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there. – Eric Hoffer

But somewhere in that void is our essence looking for us from within.
At an early age we start “filling the glass” with real and imagined things until we have defined ourselves. Eventually the glass becomes a facebook page or an about page that we believe is the real us. But is it? Do we want to be known or do we really just want to know ourselves? The current consensus is: it’s complicated.

There are many possible responses to discovering the emptiness we’re born with, but they generally fall into two categories: denying it and trying desperately to fill it, or sitting quietly and watching what develops. Addiction is a good example of the former, since it’s the high-speed, high-intensity version of socially acceptable consumption. Instead of living with ourselves – moments of confusion and all – we abdicate the responsibility, relying on both the subject of addiction and the trappings surrounding it to make up the sum of our lives. That’s part of why recovery can be so difficult; take all of that away, and there’s still the same emptiness we began with. We can go through cocaine detox, throw away our paraphernalia and let go of friends, but if we don’t make peace with the root of the problem it’s unlikely that we’ll stay clean. The same goes for other temporary solutions: they only work as long as we don’t look too closely, and nobody can keep their eyes averted forever.

This empty place is the source of thirst, and it DOES feel good to fill it with a log roll. photo by James Folks

So how do we make peace with our emptiness, and how do we give ourselves room to find and become an authentic person inside that space? Accepting it is one of the stepping stones of Buddhism, and various religions have called it a “God-shaped hole”, but other people find different ways to have their moment of peace. Some find it through sheer movement: Helen Thompson said that “in riding a horse, we borrow freedom”. That moment of floating on skis, wheels or feet, when the internal chatter quiets, and what we’re left with is our body and the world around.

Floating

No fear, no worry about what others think about us or what our purpose in life is – just the realization that being alone with our heartbeat can be enough. There we find the capital T in truth, where the same forces sling planets around suns, and pump blood through our hearts.

2 Responses

Spot on brother…..the seeking of the God spaced hole is not enough for me on my wanderings…..I want to spiral out and explore where the boundaries of that God spaced hole meet my flesh and blood, my conscious thoughts….and then challenge them all in hopes that I might learn something new.